The green, green grass of home is my dream

George Home once said, “Patience strengthens the spirit, sweetens the temper, stifles anger, extinguishes envy, subdues pride, bridles the tongue.”

Obviously he never spent a long, cold winter cooped up in this part of the country awaiting signs of spring. 

I don’t know about you, but my patience is pooped out and my disposition has run amuck. I’m sick of the cold and tired of defrosting the ends of my fingers each morning. 

My thoughts have started to freeze to the side of my brain in a slush pile of alphabet soup weighted down by too much snow, too much cold, too much, too much, too much.

If the mercury doesn’t pull up its socks pretty soon I’m going to lose it. Mother Nature and her sun need to get up off the couch and start pushing up tulips.

During one of my recent cold-induced fitful “Yosemite Sam” moments I blew into the hardware store and bought all the 10-pack bags of “Grabber” hand warmers.

It’s all come down to instant warmth everywhere and I’ve been jamming those little suckers into my mitts, my boots, and anywhere else on my person I can achieve a constant radiant heat that keeps the wind chill at bay.

The package says the average to maximum activated temperature of the little beauties is 135-156 F (57-69 C). They’re not kidding.

On one of the burdening -43C wind chill days, while trudging from the house to the barn with hand warmers duct taped in rows under my winter clothes to my long john underwear, I fell off the path and into the deep snow. 

As I lay there paralyzed like the kid in the huge snowsuit from the movie, “A Christmas Story,” my synthetic body heat armor melted the all the snow around me in a 12-inch radius. Sweet.

But despite the body toast I’m still in a “winter blues” funk.

And I’m talking to houseflies. I found myself encouraging one to get up and stretch its legs the other day because I figured it was a sign of spring if it was moving around.

That was okay until I found him rubbing his back legs together while pooping in my oatmeal.

I joined “Millie” the cat the other day in staring out the living room window into the “nothing”—a white frontier of snow where all I can see are the sunburned tips of my lovely evergreen trees all but hidden under the mountain of white stuff. 

“All I want to do is cut the grass,” I said to the cat, who gave me a flat stare that led me to believe I must be fevered to have said such a stupid thing given that there’s about three acres out there to cut. 

And it goes without saying that in about three months I will be complaining about having to do that job twice a week just to keep the grass at bay.

But right now I’d give up chocolate for at least a week just to sink my toes into a lawn full of too-tall green grass under a big old sunshine day where the temperature outside melted the butter on the kitchen counter. 

Ah, to dream.